Choice of Games

    There's an outfit making (mostly) free games for smart phones called Choice of Games. They make games that are almost entirely text-based, so the story is the thing that sells (or recommends, since it's free) the game. I've been obsessively playing one of their offerings, Choice of the Vampire. You might infer from that that it's really really good, but this would not be a totally valid inference.
    The story is really really good, but the game is silly. You're playing as a vampire on the Mississippi in the nineteenth century. You can play as any number of characters, including a well-to-do Creole, a German soldier, a Cajun planter, a slave, a Southern aristocrat, a Yankee trader, an Irish immigrant, a Scotch-Irish hillbilly, a priest, and a Spanish artisan. This would be great and awesome, if choosing a different character made any difference in the game. However, it doesn't, or doesn't hardly, and it makes me crazy. It's still a fun game, mind you, but it could be so much better.
    I mention all this because Choice of Games provides the software to let you make your own game for them. Fairly obviously, you're rather constrained by the channels the software sets up for you. One problem with the vampire game is that whatever you do, when the chapter is over, you have to move on. In one case, this means torches and pitchforks no matter how much you bend over backwards to make your neighbors happy.
    So it's a writing challenge. A matter of making the torches and pitchforks make sense whatever choices you make. Not that I (or they) would want to do vampires again. But I had a couple of ideas that excite me: Choice of the Spaceman ("It's a cookbook!") and Choice of Godzilla. I think they could be a lot of fun. Anyway, this is how I want to waste my time in the coming weeks. Whether Fate will give me the choice, I don't know.